Beethoven

by Suchet, John

  It was as the waters receded and the town was struggling to get back on its feet that the Elector died, replacing one form of disarray with another. The succession was immediate, since it was the custom for all Electors to have a coadjutor, an appointed successor. In this case, the new Elector of Bonn and Archbishop of Cologne and Münster, was one Maximilian Franz.

  As Ludwig had been fortunate in his teacher Neefe, he was just as fortunate in the chosen successor as Elector. The same cannot be said for his father. In fact the months following Maximilian Franz’s accession were the most difficult the Beethoven family had had to face to date.

  MAX FRANZ, as he was familiarly known, was to play a crucial role in the development of young Ludwig van Beethoven as a composer, though it did not seem that way to start with. Endowed with an acute mind and a love of the arts, he did nothing to endear himself to his people. In fact his deportment and looks made him the butt of sarcastic humour. He was described as kindly, lazy, fond of a joke, honest, amiable and affable. He had a debilitating limp, caused when he fell from his horse on campaign in Bavaria. That put paid to his short-lived military career, and so he followed the only other career path open to a member of the ruling Habsburgs: the church.

  Installed in Bonn, sedentary and inactive, he quickly put on weight, and more and more weight, and was soon chronically obese, which did nothing to improve his reputation. But he had one attribute that stilled all seditious tongues. He was the youngest son of Empress Maria Theresa, and brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. He was also brother of Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia), wife of Louis XVI and Queen of France. In other words, he was a senior member of the most powerful ruling family in Continental Europe.

  He used that power the moment he became Elector. He shut down the theatre company, depriving Neefe of a portion of his income, and ordered full and detailed reports into every aspect of government, including musical appointments and activities. The result of this investigation was to have profound implications for the Beethoven family.

  Each and every court musician was investigated, and individual reports submitted. Of the three musicians directly relevant to our story, it was a disaster for Johann van Beethoven, a potential disaster for Neefe, and rather good news for young Ludwig. The reports have survived, and make compelling reading.

  J. van Beethoven, age 44, born in Bonn, married, his wife is 32 years old, has three sons living in the electorate aged 13, 10 and 8 years, who are studying music. Has served 28 years, salary 315 fl.

  Johann Beethoven has a very stale voice, has been long in the service, is very poor, of fair deportment and married.

  Christ. Gottlob Neefe, aged 36, born at Chemnitz, married, his wife is 32, born at Gotha, has two daughters in the electorate aged 5 and 2, has served three years, was formerly Kapellmeister with Seiler, salary 400 fl.

  Christian Neefe, organist, in my humble opinion might well be dismissed, inasmuch as he is not particularly versed on the organ. Moreover he is a foreigner, having nothing in his favour, and is of the Calvinist religion.

  Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 13, born at Bonn, has served two years, no salary.

  Ludwig van Betthoven [sic], a son of the Betthoven sub No. 8, has no salary, but during the absence of the Kapellmeister Luchesy [Lucchesi] he played the organ, is of good capability, still young, of good and quiet deportment, and is poor.

  Johann van Beethoven’s ‘very stale voice’ was tantamount to a death sentence on his career, though it was to be a few years before the axe fell. Neefe’s Protestant religion is now counting against him. Young Ludwig, it seems, has a bright future. And also a problem. If Neefe is sacked, he is the obvious successor as court organist. One can imagine the boy was torn between his natural ambition and loyalty to his teacher.

  The situation was resolved by a decision to keep Neefe on, but he found his salary slashed, with a good proportion of it going to his assistant. It is the first time Ludwig van Beethoven was paid for his services as a musician. He was thirteen years of age, and it was to be the first, and almost last, salaried position of his entire life. Maybe that was the stimulus for his next grand compositional project, nothing modest: a piano concerto. But, probably realising he was not ready, he abandoned it.7

  Ludwig had been fortunate ... the same cannot be said for his father

  Young Ludwig, now a teenager, was acquiring a confidence that saw him start to behave in ways that drew admiration and exasperation in equal measure. In Holy Week it was customary for a court singer to sing portions of the Lamentations of Jeremiah to Gregorian chant, accompanied on the piano. In 1785 the singer was the highly respected Ferdinand Hiller, and the pianist Ludwig van Beethoven. A mischievous streak, hitherto largely hidden, emerged in Ludwig, who was piqued at Hiller’s self-confidence and tuneless singing.

  On day two, he asked Hiller for permission to try and throw him off the note by varying the piano accompaniment. Hiller apparently readily agreed, stressing his experience against his accompanist’s lack of it. In the service, Ludwig’s fingers flew off in all directions, save for one finger which repeatedly struck the note that Heller should sing. Heller held his ground, but soon found the dazzling accompaniment too distracting. Towards the end of the passage, he lost the note completely.

  Lacking a sense of humour, as well as the superior talent he believed he had, Hiller entered a formal complaint against Ludwig with the Elector. Max Franz admonished Ludwig, but with a smile on his face, saying in future he had better stick to simple accompaniment. Kapellmeister Lucchesi, on the other hand, was a good enough musician to see that Ludwig’s skill on the keyboard was a rather more important attribute than Hiller’s singing.

  This anecdote was recorded by a young man who was to have the most profound influence on the life of Ludwig van Beethoven.

  1 The Elector whose valet Maria Magdalena would marry some two years later.

  2 Together with the daughter who was born and died in 1779, and the eldest son Ludwig Maria who died at a week, this means that in her first ten years of marriage to Johann, Maria Magdalena gave birth seven times – eight times in all, including the infant she bore her first husband.

  3 The harmonic embellishment of the bass line.

  4 The twenty-four keys in major and minor.

  5 Neefe’s assessment of Mozart is remarkable too, given that the composer was still only twenty-seven years of age, and had not yet composed many of his finest works.

  6 A critical edition of The 35 Piano Sonatas published in 2007 by Britain’s leading Beethoven scholar, Professor Barry Cooper of Manchester University, was the first modern edition to include all thirty-five sonatas as a set.

  7 The piano part, and some orchestral passages, have survived.

  Chapter

  THREE

  Meeting Mozart

  FRANZ WEGELER WAS FIVE YEARS older than Ludwig, and it is not clear how and exactly when they became friends. It was certainly in the early years of 1780, when they were at opposite ends of their teenage years. How, though, is difficult to answer, because theirs was an unlikely friendship. They cannot have been school friends, given the age difference and that neither referred, in their writings or reported conversation, to their school years. Ludwig, we know, made few friends in his early years, having so little in common with other youngsters. If he looked up to the intelligent Wegeler as something of a role model, that does not explain what Wegeler saw in him. Musical talent, obviously, but again there is no evidence then or later that Wegeler had any particular interest in music – he himself admitted it – and it is unusual for teenagers to mix with youths several years younger than themselves.

  There was no meeting of minds either, on intellectual matters. Ludwig was totally consumed with music, playing and composing. Wegeler, on the other hand, had scientific interests, and was to go on to qualify as a doctor. That they became close friends, though, is not in doubt, and it led Wegeler to publish, along with a future friend, his recollections of Ludwig in his Bonn years.1 When, a lit
tle over a decade later, both were in Vienna, Wegeler wrote that ‘hardly a day went by when we did not see one another’. That was clearly true in Bonn, too.

  Wegeler instinctively knew how to handle the unpredictable youngster. He recalls in his memoirs how Ludwig developed an aversion to playing at social occasions, and he would often become angry when asked to do so. He would walk round to see Wegeler, gloomy and upset, complaining that he had been forced to play ‘even if the blood burned under his fingernails’. Wegeler’s tactic was to chat to him and amuse him to calm him down, until gradually a conversation would develop between them. When he judged the moment was right, Wegeler would walk to the writing table and tell his young friend that if he wished to continue the conversation, he had to sit on the chair in front of the piano facing outward. Soon the temptation to play became too strong; Ludwig would turn and play a few chords. Before long, he was turned fully round and then ‘the most beautiful melodies would develop’.

  Later, as Ludwig’s skills improved, Wegeler took to leaving a blank piece of manuscript paper on a nearby stand, in the hope that Ludwig would cover it with notes. Instead he used to pick it up, fold it, and put it in his pocket. ‘All I could do was laugh at myself,’ writes Wegeler.

  Ironically the most important service Franz Wegeler was to afford Ludwig did not come from Wegeler himself – instead it came from a family he introduced him to. The von Breunings were a respected and highly cultured family, prominent in court and social life in Bonn. One day some time around 1784, Wegeler, who was acquainted with the Breunings, suggested he take Ludwig along to meet them. It is not an exaggeration to say that this marked a turning point in the life of the teenage musician.

  THE BREUNINGS were not simply well liked, but were owed a great deal of respect due to the fact that the head of the family, Court Councillor Emanuel Joseph von Breuning, had lost his life in a fire at the Electoral Palace. In determined and frantic efforts to save as many art treasures and papers as he could, Breuning had gone back into the blazing building one time too many, and died as the structure collapsed on him.

  His widow, Helene, was left to bring up four children, ranging in age from six years to an infant of four months. Finances were not a problem, and the family lived in an imposing two-storey house with dormer windows and a gated front garden in the elegant Münsterplatz in Bonn.2 There, Helene von Breuning was determined to give her children as cultured and varied an upbringing as possible.

  One can well imagine the trepidation Ludwig felt as he stood at the gate of the Breuning house for the first time, particularly if his appearance was as haphazard as in his schooldays. True, he had by now performed in the salons of the nobility, and was not lacking in self-confidence, but I suspect there would have been more than a twinge of nerves as he walked through the gate for the first time, which liveried staff and the opulence within will have done nothing to dispel.

  What might have persuaded Wegeler to introduce his undoubtedly rather gauche and socially inept friend to such a highborn and cultured family? The answer is obvious, even if it cannot be proved. Helene von Breuning had told young Wegeler she wanted her children to have piano lessons, and he replied that he knew just the fellow.

  We can probably assume that she had seen Ludwig perform in a salon and been duly impressed, reasoning that his remarkable talent would compensate for any lack in social graces. She might also have calculated that her children would take more easily to a teenager than to an adult. Otherwise why should she not have chosen Christian Neefe, a much more highly qualified musician, for the role? Certainly he would have struggled to find the time, given his onerous court duties, but he certainly could have done with the extra income. We might even assume that he resented the fact that his young assistant was earning extra cash, though that can only be speculation.

  Ludwig did more than teach piano to the Breuning children. He in effect grew up as part of the Breuning household, becoming almost a surrogate member of the family. Wegeler writes that not only did Ludwig spend the greater part of the day in the Breuning house, but many nights too. It was there, also, that he first became acquainted with German literature, especially poetry. It is beyond doubt that he will have been introduced to the works of the two emerging giants of German literature, Goethe and Schiller. Wegeler also tells us that he read Homer and Plutarch. He was trained too in social etiquette. He even went away on holiday with the family. Helene von Breuning clearly took him under her wing and made it her duty to fill in the gaps – academic and social – that early exit from school and singular devotion to music had caused.

  At the same time, she was exceedingly tolerant of his sometimes wilful behaviour. He was also employed as piano teacher in a count’s house directly across the square – quite possibly Helene von Breuning secured it for him – and when it was time for him to go to the count’s house, she would be prepared for him to make excuses for not going, but insist he went. Then, when he left, she would remain in the doorway and watch him. Sometimes he would turn back immediately and say it was impossible to give a lesson that day, but tomorrow he would give two. Instead of scolding him, according to Wegeler, Helene would simply shrug her shoulders and say, ‘He has his raptus again.’ Wegeler does not elucidate on the word ‘raptus’, but it does not take much imagination to discern its meaning.

  There is no doubt Ludwig was aware of just how kind and indulgent Helene von Breuning was towards him. Later in life he referred to the Breunings as guardian angels, and said of Helene, somewhat obscurely and with maybe a touch of arrogance, ‘She understood how to keep the insects off the flowers.’

  In a touching passage in his memoirs, Wegeler, who married the only Breuning daughter, Eleonore, describes how many years later he, his wife and mother-in-law would get together and discuss the remarkable achievements of Europe’s greatest living composer, and reminisce about how they remembered him as a gauche youth. Helene, then in her late seventies, was finding it difficult to recall the past, but still remembered young Ludwig with affection.

  IT IS HARDLY SURPRISING Ludwig escaped as often as he could to the cultured and affectionate surroundings of the Breuning household. Things at home were going from bad to worse. The unloved First Minister Count Belderbusch had died a few months after the death of his protector, Elector Maximilian Friedrich (a double blow for the Abbess). This led to a bizarre and ruinous course of action on the part of Johann van Beethoven.

  He decided to put forward a claim on Belderbusch’s estate, on the grounds that he had given several valuable gifts to the Count and his mistress, in return for which he had been promised promotion to Kapellmeister. To describe this course of action as ‘bizarre’ is an understatement. Johann was in effect saying Belderbusch had told him he could be bribed to give Johann the top musical job. Bribery might not have been entirely unknown in late eighteenth-century Europe, but to suggest the First Minister in a Habsburg principality who had made it his mission to end profligacy and introduce savings in the economy could be bribed to give an exalted position that was not actually in his gift to a mediocre musician who was known to like his alcohol is absurd.

  It gets worse. At the bottom of the petition demanding that the Belderbusch heirs return the gifts, Johann forged the signature of a lawyer. The lawyer, one Nikolaus Phennings, swore in an affidavit, ‘The above signature is not in my hand and I have not the slightest knowledge of this document, with all its vileness.’

  The fraud quickly unravelled, and Johann was fortunate not to face legal action. What led Johann to embark on this doomed piece of folly is not known. Alcohol will have played its part, but this was more than a moment of madness. He must have thought about it over a period of days, even weeks. If anything, it is a sign of just how permanently addled his brain was.

  His reputation, already low, now reached rock bottom. Not that it had far to travel to get there. Two years earlier, a court report on Ludwig’s petition seeking appointment as assistant court organist stated, ‘... Your Grace has graciously pr
ovided for [Ludwig van Beethoven’s] care and subsistence, his father no longer being able to do so ...’ Evidence that Johann remained of low standing, and was little more than a figure of ridicule, was to come on his death in 1792, when the Elector wrote to a court official, ‘The revenues from the liquor excise have suffered a loss.’

  Johann continued to earn a pittance, but Ludwig was in effect the family breadwinner. Given his father’s alcoholism, he was also de facto head of the household. This was before he was midway through his teens. The pressure he was under must have been enormous. He held a salaried position at court, which demanded serious work. He was continuing instruction with Neefe. At home he was witnessing his father’s increasing alcoholism and his mother’s distress. This was made immeasurably worse by his mother’s obviously declining health. She was showing all the signs of having contracted the deadly disease of consumption (tuberculosis).

  And yet he found time to compose. He wrote a rondo, a song ‘To an Infant’ (possibly in the aftermath of his baby brother Franz Georg’s death at the age of two), the aforementioned piano concerto, three piano quartets, and a trio for piano and wind.

  Ludwig’s dream was about to come true

  In these early compositions the influence of one man above all others is evident: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In musical circles in Bonn the extraordinary achievements of Mozart were well known. As soon as new works were published, they made their way to Bonn where they were eagerly seized on by the court musicians, and it is certain that in his lessons with Neefe, he and his teacher pored over the music, examining, deconstructing, and generally holding Mozart up as an example to be emulated.